Category Archives: 50th Anniversary Series

Well, it’s over. From the 105 family medicine educators who signed on at the first STFM meeting in 1967 to the more than 1,850 who attended our Annual Spring Conference in 2017, STFM’s year of celebrating our 50th Anniversary is at an end. From blog posts and other social media activities to written pieces in Family Medicine and other journals, to in-person, live celebrations at our conferences, it has been a year for recollection and reflection. We closed the time capsule at the Conference on Practice Improvement in Louisville, KY.

All too often the present is used to inform the past, and time is spent reinterpreting, representing, and even reforming the past through the lens of the current. This was never the intention of learning from history. The past is best used to better understand the present in order to inform the future. STFM is poised to do just that as we press forward into the unknown: the future.

The Past and the PresentSTFM’s tagline is “transforming health care through education.” Academic family medicine has made an impact on medical education and medical practice for the better. Two prominent examples are The Five Microskills and Evidence Based Medicine (EBM).

One of the single most impactful educational articles ever written was “A Five-Step Microskills Model of Clinical Teaching” by Neher, Gordon, Meyer, and Stevens in 1992.1 It has been used, referenced, and taught by many medical educators, and has even been repackaged by others as the “One-Minute Preceptor.”

The interprofessional, collaborative work of David Slawson, MD and Allen Shaughnessy, PharmD in the arena of EBM, with their emphasis on prioritizing findings relevant to patients and on outcomes that matter (mortality, morbidity, quality of life, and cost) have immeasurably changed how family doctors categorize data, think, write, research, and practice. Across family medicine and medicine in general the principles established by these educators have enhanced the quality of teaching and patient care.

The Present and the Future
Looking to the future as a community of teachers and scholars working to advance family medicine, the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine will continue to work to positively transform health care through education and be the indispensable academic home for medical educators. We will continue proven practices while developing new tools for, and new approaches to medical education in the evolving health care landscape.

We will continue to pursue patient-centered, learner-centered education. We will be resolute in pursing patient-centered, population-beneficial care. We will ensure that all three legs of the EBM stool—best available evidence, clinical expertise, and patient values—are valued in the medical decision-making process.

We envision a time of accelerated growth and impact of family medicine in which STFM remains instrumental and becomes more influential in medical education. We envision:

Growth in size and impact through progressive medical education research, assessment, investigation, and appraisal that advances our mission and informs our ability to provide the fundamental skills for excelling in education;

The future looks like bright and busy as we continue working to bring about an adequate and effective primary care workforce capable of providing excellent health care to all Americans in a way that addresses social determinants of health in order to bring about health equity.

During most of my adult life, I’ve felt called to help close the achievement gap that exists in our country. So I deferred medical school to teach middle school math and science in inner city Baltimore with Teach For America. During my 2 years of teaching, I found that while I loved my students and I loved teaching them algebra and life sciences, I felt called back into the field of medicine. I saw that the best way for me to close the achievement gap was to return to medicine to find ways to address the many social determinants of health that kept my students from success.

In medical school, I was the education director for the MedZou Student-Run Free Clinic. The clinic both teaches medical students the joys of primary care and provides health care to the uninsured. My time at MedZou not only inspired me to become a family physician but also gave me the opportunity to create new programs to teach medical students while providing quality care to those in need. It’s at this intersection—the intersection of helping those in need while also stimulating medical students to be future family doctors for the underserved—where I truly feel I am able to fulfill my calling to close the achievement gap in our country.

In residency, I worked in an urban underserved environment with a predominantly Spanish-speaking population. Our patients had many social issues, including homelessness, addiction, food instability—the list goes on. In a place of great need like Lawrence, MA, I was motivated by how much family medicine was valued there. My patients deserved doctors who are full-spectrum trained and committed to quality, access, and patient-centeredness. And that’s what they got.

When Mary Theobald, the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine Vice President of Communications and Programs, asked me to write a blog in celebration of the 50th anniversary of STFM, I was happy to oblige.

This month marks my 25th anniversary of medical school graduation and entering family medicine residency, so my career represents the second half of STFM’s lifespan!

STFM has been part of my professional development since my early clinical training. As a resident, I attended my first STFM meeting, the Families in Health Conference at Amelia Island. I will never forget the warm welcome I received from everyone I met there including senior colleagues who were well known in the field. My experience at the Families and Health meeting hooked me and I attended the annual meeting later in residency. STFM rapidly became my professional home and solidified my nascent desire to enter a career in academic family medicine. Even in my first practice after residency, as a full-time family physician in a rural community health center, I stayed involved and attended STFM meetings several times.

I have made many important professional relationships over the years through my involvement with STFM. These would not have been possible without this network of accomplished national colleagues. In 2004, I served as the conference chair for the 24th Annual Conference on Families in Health and have been a mentor and served on the steering committee for the Behavioral Health/Family Systems Educator Fellowship over the last several years.

As a member of the 50th Anniversary Task Force, I was once again privileged to meet exciting colleagues both from across the country and the life span of family medicine educators. At the recent annual meeting, during a reflective writing preconference that I was facilitating, I experimented with writings for this blog.